Walking through the Java EE 6 implementation maze

I’ve been asked so many times “what are the implementations of such or such specification in Java EE 6 ?” or “what is the reference implementation of such a spec ?“. Because I always forget some (and to be honest, sometimes I don’t even know if a spec has several implementations of not), I’m writing this post to help me (and you) to remember.

So here is a non-exhaustive list of the several Java EE 6 implementations (please leave a comment to add anything to this list) :

(*) not final yet at the time of writing this article (+) not sure about that

Yes, it’s a maze and sometimes it’s difficult to walk through it… but hey, that’s also the strengh of being standard, portable and avoiding vendor locking. I will never say that an application is 100% portable through implementations (if you hear someone telling you this, don’t trust him/her), but it can get close to 100% in many cases. That’s also the difference between standard and defacto-standard (check the definition of De Facto).

And because I get lost in this maze, please help me in finding my way out. If I’ve missed something and I’m mistaken, please use the comments to improve this maze and give me your suggestions.

Webpshere 8, Weblogic 12g, GlassFish 3, JBoss 7… they all implement the entire Java EE 6 spec, so it’s normal that Webpshere lists them on their web page. What I’m looking for is all these “standalone” implementations that you can use outside the original application server. For example, what is the JPA 2.0 implementation in WAS 8 ? If it’s an IBM one, what’s its name and, more important, can I download it and use it outside WAS 8. It’s interssting to see that WAS 8 uses Apache MyFaces as the JSF 2 implementation.